Her relationship with her son Augustine, a notoriously wayward youth, progressed along much the same path. Augustine pursued all manner of hedonistic delights, ultimately culminating in a mistress who bore him a son, Adeodatus. Indeed, it is Augustine who uttered the famous prayer to God: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
He also abandoned the Christianity of his mother, instead flirting with paganism and a popular dualistic Eastern religion, Manichaeism, known for its mysterious cultic practices. These behaviors deeply grieved the faithful Monica, though she never gave up hope that God would make good out of this evil.
The Inexhaustible Intransigence of a Mother’s Love
Monica took her frustrations and parental misery to God, and ran after her son Augustine with abandon. She prayed, fasted, and wept over her son’s wayward ways. This led a local unnamed bishop to console her: “the child of those tears shall never perish.”
When Augustine secretly fled his mother for Rome, she followed after him. When he moved on to Milan, she kept on his trail. Like any good mother, Monica did not let her child’s stubbornness, stupidity, or blatant sin obscure her love for him. As Augustine writes,
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Like all mothers, though far more than most, she loved to have me with her, and she did not know how much joy you were to create for her through my absence. She did not know, and so she wept and wailed, and these cries of pain revealed what there was left of Eve in her, as in anguish she sought the son whom in anguish she had brought to birth. Yet when she had finished blaming my deception and cruelty, she resumed her entreaties for me.
In the end, her perseverance paid off. After 17 years of resistance, Augustine converted to Christianity under the wise instruction of St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan. Monica’s extended period of longsuffering for him matched her waiting for her husband, for whom she may have prayed for as long as 30 years.
